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Cutting-edge of Cloud Computing

Just got off the bus in Montreal, Québec. This is a lightning visit, in 48 hours, I’ll be back in my office in Ottawa. But, right now, I’m taking a drink in one of my favorite downtown coffee shop and I’m planning.

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

  • automatic & dynamic launch of new ‘branch’ systems (xen dom0), without having to do anything more than to rack them (no OS install needed, can be upgraded by rebooting them),
  • high redundancy at the leaf level (xen domU, automatic migration toward less used dom0),
  • failure resistace through bonded interface, multi-path & multi-host fiberchannel SAN & controller…
  • This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.